Creating and Using Web Services in the ATG Platform

A common requirement for enterprise applications is the ability to share data and business logic with other applications. For example, suppose you have an employee portal built with the Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform, and also a payroll system based on some other software package. When a new employee starts, or an existing employee changes his or her marital status, you need to create or modify the employee’s profile in both systems. Ideally, you’d like the employee to be able to make the changes in one application and have those changes automatically propagate to the other application.

One way to address this issue is through Web Services, a widely supported standard for packaging remote procedure calls in an XML-based structure. In the example above, you could create a Web Service that automatically updates an employee’s profile in the employee portal when the information in the payroll system is modified.

The Dynamo Application Framework includes tools that allow you to create custom Web Services that call methods on Nucleus components. These custom Web Services can expose methods on existing Oracle ATG Web Commerce Nucleus components, or on Nucleus components you write yourself. You can call these Web Services from an external application client, such as the payroll system mentioned above.

The Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform packages Web Services as: J2EE applications, in accordance with the JAX-RPC (JSR 101) and Implementing Enterprise Web Services (JSR 109) specifications. Note that this manual assumes that you’re familiar with these specifications, and with Web Services in general. For more information about these specifications, see the Java Community Process web site at:

http://www.jcp.org

The following sections discuss how to create Web Services in the Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform, and how to write Java and .NET clients that call these services: